There is a tendency in our consumerist and
speed-driven society to try to have, do, be MORE. The emphasis on personal growth
is a part of this. People today often respond to spiritual desire with the growth
paradigm. In a time when so many of us are already stretched to the limit with more-focus,
moreness, it is with an odd desperation that we follow the wide road of more to
seek what is essential, to seek love and spirit and soul and God. What a relief it would
be to learn that we can do less and become essential, essence, a-sense.

There are powerful archetypes in the language. If we
choose language that emphasizes growth, we set in motion many half-conscious or
unconscious factors. Our ecological crisis may be blamed in part on such growth focus. But
so can the spread of democracy over the last thousand years. Colonialism was growth,
considered good or bad by different people at different historic times. We may applaud
when a small company grows well (Ben and Jerry's, Apple) or be appalled at the
impersonality of a corporation grown huge (Exxon, Apple). Cortisone, synthesized the year
my husband was born, has been a key to preserving our son's life. Cortisone was both the
product and the flagship in an enormous growth in pharmaceutical research.

My point is that growth is not all bad. It can be
wonderful. But it is not the only, nor even the best, paradigm for spiritual practice. I
perceive that it is the dominant modern paradigm however. Let us take several
points one at a time.

Baby Teeth

I work in the dental field and have amused myself
with metaphors of teeth. (Jung said that people relate to their teeth as either tools,
weapons or ornaments. What a rich idea! Think about that one for a moment, your teeth.
Your friend's teeth. Smile.)

There is a condition known as "Pattern of
Retained Deciduous Teeth." Baby teeth that do not fall out before permanent teeth are
erupting. To develop a healthy, functioning dentition - for eating, for speaking, for
appearance - may require extractions and/or orthodontic guidance.

Many people seem to have the psychological
equivalent of this pattern. They are not growing properly. They have grown up teeth:
ability to think abstractly, adult bodies, reproductive maturity, age of majority...which
are coming in askew. They are still using their baby teeth to chew, still retaining the
social styles of children: vulnerability, dependency, manipulativeness, egotism. Baby
teeth serve a purpose. We could not do without them. Children need those traits (yes,
parents, even manipulativeness and egotism have their season). In normal development, the
roots of baby teeth are resorbed, and by the time they fall out the roots are nearly gone.
In the unusual pattern of retention I'm describing here, however, the roots are still
deep. In the psychological version, the habits and styles are anchored, tenacious.

The behaviors and thinking appropriate to children
in which many adults seem frozen are the basis of much therapy. The Inner Child is the
character motivating us even as adults if our childhood needs were not met. We could not
mature, we were locked at a particular stage of development. Our growth was stunted. Inner
child therapy is nothing new, has gone under many names. A key is befriending and
parenting that child, guiding him through missed phases toward maturity. Sure, there will
always be a part of one that is the child one was, but a conscious relationship with that
part of oneself is different than the unconscious patterns of an unacknowledged
inner child.

Democracy is By and For Adults

Therapy today is often overfocused on the past, on
examining childhood. James Hillman shares some of my concerns:

But if you're looking backward, you're not
looking around...Now, the child archetype is by nature apolitical and disempowered - it
has no connection with the political world. And so the adult says, "Well, what can I
do about the world? This thing is bigger than me." That's the child archetype
talking. "All I can do is go into myself, work on my growth, my development, find
good parenting, support groups." This is a disaster for our political world, for our
democracy. Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children.

That is a very important consideration:
"Democracy depends on intensely active citizens, not children." Citizen
and consumer are not interchangeable terms but the prevailing attitude in this
country is that of consumerism, not citizenship. John F. Kennedy's famous words, "Ask
not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country", was
directed toward adults, citizens, who recognized and accepted their roles and
responsibility. Civic duty is not always fun. It involves delayed gratification, showing
up at town meeting, voting on the school budget. Even in presidential elections our
national turnout is abysmal, well below less developed nations where getting to the polls
maybe very difficult, even dangerous.

Children are disenfranchised. As adults we must
protect and exercise the franchise. The Child archetype is beautiful and powerful in its
innocence, creativity, and spontaneity. It should be celebrated and nurtured in our world,
but not out of proportion to other archetypes, like Warrior, Mother, Healer.

Helping Groups

The child archetype wants what it wants now.
So we have a credit card crisis, and the United States is the largest debtor nation in the
world. Focus on instant gratification and deferred responsibility are childish. The
consequences of an excess of these behaviors are not fulfilling to adults. They bring a
hollow, unsatisfied feeling, which ironically, we may try to fill with continued instant
fixes, continuing the cycle of grasping.

The child needs support. Fifteen-million Americans
each week go to some form of twelve-step program. They don't go out of their house and
away from their TV or the mall in order to serve the community. First and foremost they go
because they want support. To be supported. In the process there is a magic that
occurs and people become supporters as well as supportees. But long time veterans of such
groups lament that there is far more selfishness these days.

I want to make clear that I honor and celebrate
support groups. Some societies have a (real or imagined) history of supporting members in
need, such as in illness or grief. But the modern self-help movement may have no historic
precedent. Today, groups are actively supporting people through cancer, sexual battery,
etc. There is also the remarkable phenomenon of traditional social outcasts meeting in
mutual respect and care: these run the gamut from Alcoholics Anonymous, where people help
one another change destructive behavior; to Dignity (a gay Catholic organization), where
people support the sanctity of their whole persons in light of a beloved religious
tradition which usually negates or condemns them. Members of support groups share
practical and spiritual stories as they live them. These are the explorers of much new
territory. Cartographers of a shifting wilderness. Many groups are melting pots, where
differences in class, race, religion and age are diminished by a transcendent ethic of
loving care.

Here are two ideas about 12-step (Anonymous) groups.
First, recovery is the operative word and guiding principle. Can some of this
energy and love be channeled outward to another kind of recovery, like Franklin D.
Roosevelt's National Recovery Act? Here citizens strove to support other citizens,
those trampled by the Great Depression. Second, it would only take a small but critical
change of focus for these insular little groups, these self-contained (but
interchangeable) huddles of wounded, to become heart-centered civic warriors. The small
political meetings many of our parents attended, neighborhood and ward councils, are a
rare species today. Alfred Adler (the less remembered third in the triumvirate of
psychotherapeutic pioneers which includes Freud and Jung) used the word Gemeinschaftsgefuhl.
It means communal feeling, which Adler regarded as the final goal of therapy. I
think that there is a kind of love and communal feeling evident in support groups. The
energy is there, and self-helpgroups could metamorphose into helping
groups. Service benefits both the giver and the receiver. Civil servant may become a
dignified title again, and one with meaning. Adult children could emphasize and act
from their adult personae.

Snakeskins and Birdfeathers

So, I wish to turn down the volume of the growth
paradigm. What alternate images may we use? How about shedding? A snake sheds the skin
that doesn't fit anymore, like those baby teeth, those adolescent behaviors, those
twenty-something heroics, those romantic illusions.

Shedding is not "fun." It is rich,
and one comes out the other end of such a cycle feeling clean and light. We have habits
that don't fit, stale patterns. Yes, we're in a sort of balance, a familiar, if
ill-fitting, outfit. But, balance is overrated, often misunderstood. Balancing is for
checkbooks, not for art. Life should be art. Art requires the courage and discipline to
shed. Kierkegaard: "The deeper natures don't change. They become more and more
themselves." Jung says individuation is becoming more and more oneself. Not a clone,
conforming to some limited social uniform, but the person who has recognized and accepted
her destiny to live the particular artistry that becomes her. Hillman said,
"...becoming more and more oneself - the actual experience of it is a shrinking, in
that very often it's a dehydration, a loss of inflations, a loss of illusions."

Another reason we avoid shedding is because it is
often unattractive - we clump around learning new dance steps, and we're not Fred Astaire.
We dare to appear in public looking half-plucked, like the molting birds we are. And, if
our elegant snakeselves are glistening with sleek new scales at one end, well, we still
may be dragging the crackly grayish old skin along, like a dingy slip showing a foot below
an evening gown.

It's awkward and even ugly, but shedding is
wonderful, and the new feathers are worth it, the glimmery scales. Best of all, you have
cleaned out the closet, gotten rid of some of the proverbial baggage.

Judith Viorst's book Necessary Losses, is
subtitled The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies and Impossible Expectations That All of Us
Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. In the introduction she writes, "the road to
human development is paved with renunciation", and "I would like to propose that
central to understanding our lives is understanding how we deal with loss."

The child archetype in society is quite evident in
our limited patience. That includes a lack of patience for our own or other's melancholia,
mournings, acknowledgment of loss. We tell ourselves to "grow up" and "get
over", when more apt directive metaphors may be "shrivel up" and "wade
through". For the paradox is that we grow through loss and that the surest way around
is through. "Only on love's terrible other side is found the place where lion and
lamb abide."

Ordinary Onions

One of the greatest illusions is that of growing
toward enlightenment. Enlightenment is not an endpoint. Although often considered the goal
of long years (or lifetimes) of spiritual practice, enlightenment is paradoxically
atemporal. Present moment. Here and now. It is not a sudden experience of gorgeous colors
and heavenly choirs and blissful sensations. Sorry. Unh. Unh. Those experiences are
available, and they are lovely - or terrifying. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Those experiences are not the point. If we either grasp such experiences (Jack Kornfield
refers to this as "Settling for the Booby Prize") or push them away, we are
missing the raft. No matter how flashy the emotional or sensual pyrotechnics, "all
experiences are side effects."

Enlightenment is ordinary. It is profoundly
ordinary. When all of the skins are shed: all the trappings, all the names we give
ourselves, all the roles we play, all the personalities we wear, all the attachments we
have, all the aversions we have. This is not growth. It is radical shedding. It is
stripping down to the nakedness of our beating heart and going inside to find our essence.
You are like an onion. As you peel away skins those layers get thicker and more pungent.
You may cry. You certainly get smaller as you near the core. And of course there is
no core.

Sogyal Rinpoche writes, "Spiritual truth is not
something elaborate and esoteric, it is in fact profound common sense. When you realize
the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don't actually 'become' a buddha.
You simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent
spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being."

Less Becomes Moore

Bestseller lists don't impress me - I find my cynic
well-nourished when it sees that hackneyed Lawrence Sanders is "America's number one
mystery writer", and that the dreadful ode to the unexamined life and the socially
incommunicative, Bridges of Madison County (I call it Bridges of Madison Avenue)
is still riding the cloth list after two years. Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul is
a bestseller that surprised me because it is sometimes scholarly and does not give
answers. It is not a formulaic self-help package of short chapters with many lists and
exercises. Finding Thomas Moore's books on the bestseller list does make my cynic
suspicious. There is ample evidence that these are like M. Scott Peck's popular spiritual
books in this way: they are bought to be given to others as much as, if not more than, to
be read by the buyer.

One thing that can explain Moore's popularity is his
subtitle: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. That
phrase is a wistful breath, a breeze, fresh air. It implies that sacredness is an ordinary
everyday thing. Soulfulness can be lyrical and deep, but it cannot be bought. It won't
take more of your precious time, yet it can make more of your time precious. It won't cost
money. It won't mean workshops and seminars: though these may be helpful, they can
be entered into consciously and calmly, not with the desperate obligation of the
consumerized seeker.

Here is a quote from Moore's book:

Modern psychologies and therapies often
contain an unspoken but clear salvational tone: If you could only learn to be assertive,
loving, angry, expressive, contemplative or thin, they imply, your troubles would be over.

I'm interested in a humble approach, one which more
accepting of human foibles, and, indeed, sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that
acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition.

When we trade in the desire for more for an
experience of depth, we find that richness doesn't have to do with quantity.
Quantities of things or money or experiences is not what answers the cry of our soul. You
can pile quantities of these into the hole of felt need that the ego begs you to fill. But
the ego is not the soul, and ego is, by its nature, never sated. The ego is the
personification of the scarcity view. Scarcity teaches that resources are limited, there
is never enough to go around, no matter how big your bankbook (of love, food, money,
sensations, etc.) there will never beenough. This ego is a huge mouth, and it acts
like a baby tyrant. We feed and feed and feed it, because it cries so loud. It expresses
no gratitude, is never satisfied.

One may fall into the illusion that one only need
change the ego's diet. Stop feeding it junk food like cookies and television and put it on
a vegetarian organic plan of meditation and exercise, good books and Kosher food. That's
probably a step in the right direction, but be aware that this ego still won't be
satisfied. Soul, as Moore describes it, is not the rarefied eternal spirit, but rather the
very human soul, which exists in relationship. It is fed by art, music, poetry, stories.
This does not mean we should heap our plates high with the artifacts of culture in order
to sustain our hungry soul. Soul is more discriminating; she responds to depth, mystery.
Sensory overload is a turn-off, like a switch. Yes, soul has moods, phases like the moon.
This is what I mean when I say balance is over-rated and often misunderstood. Balance is
too often portrayed as gray compromise: spiritual practice as lithium.

Many people think they have achieved balance when
they have a stretch of calm, a monotony that is safe if uninspired. Don't rock the boat
time. Such periods may be only phases. The lunarlike phases of the soul. Melancholy,
hibernation, gestation, rebirth, flowering, ripening, dropping/dying/harvesting/ gathering
in...all phases. Each as sacred, as soulful, as another.

Balance is presented as a therapeutic or religious
goal attainable in this lifetime. Indeed it is, but not as a steady state. Balance is not
so much achieved, but experienced, by grace, as a cosmic surprise, an "ah ha!",
an "of course." Robert Johnson writes, "one cannot stay very long in this
middle place, for it is a knife-edge, outside space and time. A moment of it is enough to
give meaning to long stretches of ordinary life."

Such balance is not gray, not neutral. It is beyond
and contains all colors, all polarities. It is Tao, creative synthesis. It is the perfect
plumbline described by the sine wave of dualities, phases. It is the pulse of paradox.

Spiritual
Maturity

Growth maybe a wonderful paradigm for spiritual
evolution. But any system, any paradigm, only reveals its richness if challenged,
questioned, explored. If unexamined, a focus on growth as of ultimate value can lead to
ignorance of the hazards.

Spiritual maturity includes shedding as well as
growth, descent as well as ascent, community as well as individuality. Such maturity can
tolerate, even celebrate, paradox. There is a sensation that the psychic ground is
shifting under your very feet, seismic tremors which resolve only when you shift to the
fulcrum, the balance which dares embrace both sides of a question. Spiritual maturity has
the patience to embrace questioning itself. To love our questions, to live them, in a
manner not of anxious quick answering, but patient wonder - that is vibrant adulthood.

Let us create a community of citizens; adults who
cherish but don't idolize their psychic and physical children. Let us be humans who are
symbolic serpents, whose undulations describe the sine wave; whose very movement appears
as forward and inverted question marks, the punctuation of paradox; whose ancient image,
Ouroboros, finally describes the wholeness of a circle.

Quotations

In always increasing experience, we sometimes
forget to learn from experience.

Clint Weyand

Nothing is better for a man than to be without anything, having no
asceticism, no theory, no practice. When he is without everything, he is with everything.

Abu Yazid

Personal regression is easier than social change.

Clint Weyand

Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to
say. From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking
milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of more invisible
game.

Rumi

What the immature adult really wants is a womb with a view.

Clint Weyand

Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason
everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always
in perfect harmony. This is how everything exists in this realm of buddha nature, losing
its balance against a background of perfect balance.

Shunryu Suzuki

I sloughed myself as a snake sloughs off its skin. Then I looked
into myself and saw that I am He.

Abu Yazid

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved
in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked
rooms, or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which
could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point
is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the
future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't reject truth which is partial, modest, incomplete, ugly or
confusing. Truth is part of life, and the best truths are still breathing.